Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition

 March 2013, Tokyo

I went back to my room and opened Herbert Schneidau's Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Louisiana State UP, 1973) and perused again the 15 pages of his bibliography. Beginning in the late 70s, I spent ten years off and on reading through its references. I thought then it was a fine book, and I still do, though it has produced no followers.

As far as the British neolithic goes, there were two guys who seemed to dominate the field. V. Gordon Childe was an Australian and a Marxist, whose What Happened in History (1942) was published by Penguin (not an academic press, so the common man could read it) and had an attractive title. That was what I wanted to know: what happened in history? No shit.  Childe set out to destroy the Nazi conception of the Aryan race, and pretty much succeeded. The difference between then and now is largely Wikipedia. Read the section called Publications. Childe was a Marxist because he'd read and absorbed Marx, not because he believed in any particular Marxist theory. His own man and a man to respect, I think. His suicide late in his life is moving (Wiki).

The next big guy was Colin Renfrew, who arrived in time for the revolution in carbon-dating. His Penguin book was called Before Civilisation, the Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe, 1973 , and argued that the reconstructed ancestral speakers of proto-IE  weren't warriors from the Caucasus  (the Kurgan thesis) but farmers from Anatolia.

That's the just the side issue of the European neolithic. Schneidau's focus is the Near Eastern. You don't want a summary of that, though he introduced me to some great figures, like W. F. Albright. Too bad he didn't live long enough to see the Biblical archaeologists (the good ones--the Israelis) destroy the house that the Methodist Albright built. He would have enjoyed that.

The fun part of this is that Schneidau never ceases to be a literary critic who delights in going against the grain. You remember the 1970s when we were all trying to stop being alienated by joining a community and growing our own vegetables. His first chapter is called "In Praise of Alienation." He says we all left the village for a good reason, and that any time our culture throws up new gods for us to worship the prophetic tradition of demythologizing kicks in and destroys them. That is the western tradition.  

This gives him lots of targets. He shoots down the cultural pretentiousness of Charles Olson's mythologizing while exposing the lack of originality in Rudolph Bultmann's demythologizing, not to mention Derrida's version of the same. He agrees with Derrida that writing posits an original disjunction from immediacy of meaning, but finds that Isaiah had said so first.

In his introduction, excusing his lack of qualifications in the field of archaeology,  he quotes Walker Percy:  "everything is too important to be left to the specialist of that thing." That's one thing I remember.

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